ProjectGiveOpp plagiarizes blog content
A post from Project GiveOpp popped up on my radar recently and I was a bit surprised it’d already racked up 24 comments within 24 hours of being published.
Curious I took a few of the comments and punched them into Google. Not surprisingly it turned out the content had been stolen from another website with absolutely no attribution whatsoever.
The entry in question from Project GiveOpp is regarding Bill Gates supposedly promoting social engineering to achieve ‘holocaust goals’. As you’ll note, at the bottom of the article are a series of comments presented as genuine commentary from a number of people.
Only they aren’t. The comments were sourced from the original article, as was published at ‘the Well Affect Consultancy’.
Note that on my pc the comment text is showing up as white on a white background giving the impression of empty boxes; you have to highlight the comment text to read it.
As you can see, the entire article on Project GiveOpphas been copy and pasted. Further to that, someone at Project GiveOpp has gone to the trouble of individually creating comment entries for each of the comments published on the original source.
Update 16/11/2010: The editor at Project GiveOpp has deleted all of the copy and pasted articles and has since replaced them with one sentence titles. The comments have all also been removed and the entire comments system disabled. It seems plagiarizing articles wasn’t the best approach to internet marketing…
At this point it’s worth noting that the article isn’t unique to the Well Affect Consultancy and can be found all over the web, presumably ripped from an original news source. The comments however appear to be unique to the site.
Clicking over the main index of Project GiveOpp, it’s clear to see that copying and pasting the Bill Gates article wasn’t a one off. The Project GiveOpp blog is a mess of copy and pasted material from various sources around the internet.
Most of it badly copied at that (seriously, who copies HTML structures?!) and not properly attributed.
Is there really nothing unique and worthwhile left to say about the GiveOpp opportunity? That and whilst I’m not sure what GiveOpp’s marketing standards are, surely copying and pasting content from other sources isn’t acceptable.
High profile member of GiveOpp, John Lavenia, authored a book titled ‘Integrity is Everything’.
It seems the folks over at ProjectGiveOpp didn’t get a copy.
Interesting to read the Giveopp “Inner Circle Council” manifesto which can be found at the bottom of their page right next to where it says “This opportunity is not available in the state of South Dakota.”
The manifesto bears very many similarities to the crap written by $cientology founder L Ron Hubbard. For example “We will continue throughout generations to aggressively and creatively engage in activities which improve our organization’s quality of life”
Hubbard’s crazy theories claim that successive generations of humans have been contaminated by the exploded souls of aliens killed by the evil lord Xenu. Only scientology organizations, known as “orgs” can clear the planet of this contamination.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/resource-1.bigmediabox.com/images/graphics/manifesto.jpg
Check out http://xenu.net/ for more info
Are they still in business? Look around and you’ll see many of the “Founding Members” off in other ventures now.
As far as I know GiveOpp are still in business. As far as stealth business goes they are doing quite the bang up job.
Either GiveOpp is failing miserably or it’s such a roaring success that its distributors are quite happy to fly under the radar.